I'm trying to encrypt something with gpg -a and return the result to standard out rather than a file. According to the manual, it should be sufficient to omit an --output flag, but that doesn't seem to be the case. When I don't specify an output file, gnupg assumes I'm outputting to [input-file].gpg rather than stdout.

Is there a way to have GPG do this, or am I going to have to have it encrypt to a temporary file and then cat it?